11 Nov 2026 - 10:00am
Won’t somebody think of the children? Of late, this has become the vehicle of choice for every push to roll out universal digital surveillance. Last time it was anonymous posters; now HMRC is coming for your second-hand trading side-hustle, absurdly disguised as child safety, via a proposed new rule banning under-16s from websites such as eBay and Vinted.
This is a well-trodden path. It’s not long since Keir Starmer announced measures to protect children and young people from “online harms” by banning them from social media. I warned at the time that when we got more detail on how young people were to be identified and therefore protected, the measure would turn out to be a means of obliging every social media user, of every age, to submit an official ID before being allowed to use the platforms.
And so it proved: Ofcom is now suggesting that, from next March, no one in Britain should be allowed to post on social media without first showing some form of ID linked to their real identity. We’re told that this is all just about keeping 15-year-olds safe from “online harms”. But given that UK police already make 30 arrests a day for online posts, the prospect of the Government forcing every social media poster to link their account to an official ID takes on a more sinister aspect.
Labour has now announced further “child protection” restrictions that will likely mandate ID, and this time the measure is targeted at saving teenagers not from mean tweets but instead the comically nonexistent threat of “grooming” via websites such as eBay and Vinted. The pretext couldn’t be more transparent. Labour might say it’s about child protection, but wouldn’t it also be handy for the digitally-enabled trade in second-hand stuff to be compulsorily linked to individuals’ official identities? A happy by-product of keeping teenagers safe from the imaginary menace of eBay nonces would then be a new capacity to nobble anyone suspected of dodging any amount of tax, however incremental.
Given that Andy Burnham seems unable or unwilling to reduce the welfare bill any time soon, it’s hard to blame Labour for trying to shake down mums selling on their kids’ outgrown wellies. Yes, it’s the equivalent of an addict scrabbling for change down the back of the sofa. But surely, ministers must be hoping, there’s enough left for a fix.
What’s the solution? It certainly isn’t getting distracted by spurious debates about whether or not children are being groomed via direct messaging on eBay, or whether banning kids from selling their roller skates on eBay is hampering youthful entrepreneurship. These are silly dead-cat debates. We should instead be calling out the way all these digital “youth protection” policies are just thinly-disguised vehicles for abolishing online anonymity. And we should focus on the way this measure is transparently a precursor to demanding a cut of whatever money the Government imagines is currently being hidden in informal transactions by what’s left of Britain’s middle class.
But there is no such pot. There’s no money left. Unless, that is, Labour sees fit to stop pretending it can’t see Britain’s endemic, highly visible, and obviously lucrative grey economy. That includes all the dodgy practices which surround the “gig economy”, alongside “Turkish barbers”, mysteriously customer-free vape shops, and those Ubiquitous “hand car washes” which even the Guardian acknowledges are basically all employing people illegally. That’s where the unclaimed revenue is. Why isn’t Labour doing more to regulate and tax it?
Instead of rolling out ever more intrusive surveillance measures, disguised as youth safety, Labour might instead turn its attention to the enormous, growing, submerged economy of people in Britain who ignore the tax regime entirely. Or, even better, ministers might do something about the ever-widening gulf between the amount of tax British citizens are able or willing to pay, and the amount of our money our addict government insists it can’t stop spending.
